> the UK is now a lot more like Poland than it is like the United States in terms of the kinds of growth it needs to do – driven by improved use of existing technology and inputs, and accumulation of capital, rather than driven primarily by technological advancement. With the exception of a few sectors like AI, we are so far behind the frontier in terms of economic development that worrying about technological progress doesn’t make much sense, and at worst is a serious distraction.
The trouble with things that are supposed to be the next big thing is that, statistically, they are usually not.
Even if it is, the UK has a history of fumbling such things. There was a time when the UK was fairly clearly the world leader in civil nuclear energy (MAGNOX, AGR), airliners (in particular the Comet), and civilian computers (LEO-1), more or less all at the same time. This... didn't last.
One of the reasons for the UK productivity gap is our oversize services sector. In services businesses meet demand by adding headcount, and falling demand is met with layoffs. Since UK hire and fire rules are more flexible than eg FR/DE that works for secs biz. We do still have a manufacturing sector, but much of it is invisible as its the arms industry, where Britain is still a big player. That's OK because the arms industry is less price sensitive than consumer manufacturing like cars, white goods etc. In those sectors strict rules on hire and fire has forced FR and DE industry to figure out how to scale by means other than headcount.
Does the UK have anything going for it? It is very hard for me to see the UK having a better quality of life in future than they had in the past. Not being part of the EU means they will mostly be squeezed in trade negotiations. And the UK does not have any industry going for it, so sooner or later the living standards would catch up with the rest of the developing world at the middle.
And I would take Russia over the UK, even though my roots are British and I would enjoy delving into historical sites, etc, much more in the UK. But from looking on from Australia, the UK seems to be going downhill very rapidly, and has had a 'clown world' government for some time now. Russia, in contrast, only seems to be improving.
(I didn't feel this way 5 years ago. My views on the current state and future trajectories of both the UK and Russia have changed significantly over the past few years.)
Failed coup attempts are signs that someone wants the government to be unstable, but less so that it actually is.
Russia’s government has been very stable for the last couple decades, with little change in substantive authority even in the inter-Putin period when Medvedev was nominally President; certainly much less substantive change than in the UK.
(One might reasonably suspect its the kind of stability produced by a brittle regime that does not bend and is thus more likely to catastrophically break, though.)
Do you have the expertise in Russian affairs to understand what really happened and call it a coup? Curious coup when the presumed 'coup-leader' had a meeting with Putin a couple of weeks after. [1]
I don't pretend to know what actually was going on in that very curious affair, so I refrain from calling it anything. I think that's generally a good way to proceed, rather than parroting the narrative that is propagated by the Western media (who were clearly salivating at the prospect of a 'coup').
I've seen that you say that you are British. I hope you are reading more than just the British (and US) media before commenting on affairs in countries that the UK is hostile to. Particularly in the case of the British media, that is more hostile to Russia than even the US (British animosity towards Russia goes back hundreds of years).
I certainly wouldn't have wanted to live in Russia in the 90s, as it was a horrible time for the country. But Russia is vastly improved now, while I see the UK as going, quite quickly, in the opposite direction.
And as I also said, this is a fairly new sentiment for me. I have become very disappointed with where the UK is heading and frankly sickened by the actions of its governments, most prominently, in the last 18 months, its warmongering and peace-breaking in Ukraine but of course, it was also a prime instigator of the warmongering in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan and many other prior examples. But also, which is important for living there, the negative actions of its governments on its own people.
I still have a great affinity and regard for the British people and British culture but the country itself is sadly now in a very sorry state, thanks to its quite awful 'establishment' (governments, banks, intelligence agencies, media, etc).
The one thing that I am unsure about with living in Russia is living so deep inside a continent. I live on the coast of Australia (like most Australians) and my affinity is generally for coastal living or island countries. So the UK has appeal to me there. If I did have to live in the UK its west coast would be the most appealing prospect for me.
I guess this proves so much further how "what x country have going for it" is such a worthless question.
For me, a gay man, living in Russia is a real risk to my life with it's rampant violent homophobia, in a way that I feel pretty safe living in UK (or Australia, where I am from).
But sure, I guess the Russian economy is on the way up? The private military market is booming!
> For me, a gay man, living in Russia is a real risk to my life
Fair enough, although I would only add a mildly sceptical note that perhaps the 'violent homophobia' is less rampant than is reported in Western media. We are fed a huge diet of anti Russian propaganda in the West. I haven't looked into this matter personally but I would imagine that it would be good to try to find out what ordinary gay men in Russia say about how the situation actually is on the ground (versus what is said in the western press). But certainly, Russia is a more 'socially conservative' country. Although, as you probably know, being gay and being socially conservative are not necessarily antagonistic positions (cf. the great number of gay men in the clergy).
> Australia, where I am from
I'd wondered if you might also be. Partly because I saw your comment elsewhere about not wanting to live in North America & not liking its aesthetic. I feel the same way and it's probably quite common for those who leave Australia and choose the UK over the US out of English speaking countries.
> But sure, I guess the Russian economy is on the way up?
Yes, and I could make quite a case for why that's true. Let me know if you want me to assemble such a case.
It's not the worst country in the G8 for immigrants at least (if we are considering where one might like to move to). The UK for all its (countless) faults is still a far more welcoming place to immigrants than the likes of, for example, Germany.
This why it's such a weird question. What does any country "have going for it"?
Where you live is heavily loaded towards your personal preference, rather than any sort of objective economical measure. Personally, I only want to live in an English speaking country (I don't want to be a language-guest in a country). I want to live somewhere where there's "lots" going on - plenty of work opportunities and fun things to do outside of work. I don't want to live in North America because I just don't like the aesthetic.
Military importance is a big one. Part of the reason Japan and Korea industrialized so quickly after 1950 was because the West supported them economically as they were needed as a reliable bulwark against Communist expansion. The US also tolerates dictatorships worldwide (incl S Korea until 1988) if the regime is friendly to the US.
Compared to Australia, NZ, and Canada (the traditional bellweathers), the UK seems to have a lower QoL with much higher prices and much lower wages.
That said, even when I was a kid on Vancouver Island (the 2000s), we always had plenty of UK transplants working at VIHA, schools, corporate jobs, and blue collar jobs, and I've heard similar stories from coworkers of mine in Australia and NZ (eg. our head of Sales for ANZ was a First Class Honours LLB grad from a Russell's Group uni, but felt the wages and opportunity working for a Magic Circle firm were less than that if he went to Australia)
In normal circumstances everyone can afford to go to university. Doesn't necessarily mean it's a profitable decision but the scheme we have at moment basically taxes you if you do well and not if you don't.
Surprisingly we still have a few things that could be sold off for a fraction of the price. Think about the long term savings in not having to put effort into continuing costly services and letting someone else do it instead!
As someone from an actual developing country, I see a lot of very talented people moving there, and they are very happy with their transition. Most of those people could easily get into FAANGs through leetcode interviews, but US visa system drives them to Canada, UK and Germany instead.
I come from a developing country. Our football league recruits players from African countries. That doesn't mean that things are good in my country, just that they're less bad than some other places.
The UK still has a strong military, a particularly strong Navy, plus whatever remains of their portion of North Sea oil and gas.
But they missed their window after Brexit to strike the trade deals they needed, and now any trade deal they make will probably be under quite unfavorable terms.
That was always going to be the case. Brexit fantasists thought they were going to recreate the empire with UK at its center. They also thought they could do a deal with USA. What does UK offer USA if they're not in Europe?
It's hard to see, in any case, how any UK<>US trade deal (unless it was a colonial-style deal which greatly favoured the UK, or alternatively unless the UK was effectively subsumed _into_ the US; neither were ever on the cards) could possibly replace EU market access.
They didn't miss the opportunity, it was never offered. Trading partners like the US advised them to stay in the Bloc, which is the same as saying "there's no bilateral deal coming if you leave".
Trade deals are multi-year projects and the terms you can get depends on how much leverage you have. Its noy the kind of thing you jump into after leaving a bigger trade bloc. The UK wasn't going to be able to negotiate anything without the bargaining chip of duty-free access to 500m customers.
> But they missed their window after Brexit to strike the trade deals they needed
It's unclear that there ever was such a window, given the _sort_ of Brexit they did. By far the most important trade goal for Britain would have been maintaining access to the European market on similar terms to previously (or at least similar terms to, say, Switzerland); everything else paled in comparison. But the form of Brexit chosen made that impossible.
Why would the UKs living standards increase? Because the world continues to get richer.
Is the UK going to regress to developing world status? That's a heck of a claim. Has any country that was among the richest in the world regressed to developing nation status? This is supposed to happen on the basis of being marginally disadvantaged in trade negotiations?
Get real. This is sentiment because people are mad that the UK rejected their political beliefs. Could the UK suffer negative consequences versus the counterfactual as a result of Brexit? Sure. Is it going to regress to being the equivalent of, like, Peru? Obviously no.
> Is the UK going to regress to developing world status?
Lexically, tats an oxymoron, if you are regressing you are clearly not developing.
Empirically, living standards have been falling in UK for a decade, while developing countries are developing. Clearly, eventually they will intersect.
Logically, you seem to claim that a developed economy cannot collapse no matter how badly it's mismanaged?
I think that if the UK, for example, is overthrown by/elects a Maoist government or something equally crazy, then sure, they could flush their economy down the toilet.
I don't think that "being out of the EU" is in the same category.
The problem is not 'being out of the EU' by itself, its the fact:
1 - for the past 7 years, the government was doing nothing except infighting around brexit. Things like economic policy have been neglected. Straighforward non-political ssues, like the fact that wind farms wait for 10 years to be connected to the grid, are unaddressed.
2 - the current leadership is braindead. They have spent the past few months discussing how they will get rid of all EU laws in one fell swoop, without replacing them or analysing impact.
But they cannot answer basic questions - what happens in areas of economy that rely on EU law?
Like logically, what happens when you repeal EU law about ebikes? Do ebikes become illegal? Do all ebikes, even with 10 horsepower become legal? I hate the EU ebike law but you cant just delete it.
Why can't they just delete certain laws? At some historical point in time that law didn't exist, and most people somehow managed so survive. In a Common Law system, as long as something isn't explicitly illegal then it's legal.
> as long as something isn't explicitly illegal then it's legal.
Good, good, so now that you have deleted 50 years of law from UK, what are those things you've just legalised?
Certainly some types of Money laundering, probably a few types of financial fraud, carcinogens in food, and driving high-powered electric motorbikes without any kind of training or licence?
> Most people somehow managed so survive
Most people survived World War 2, and in Nagasaki most people survived getting nuked. In fact at least 50% of the population manages to survive almost anything.
On the other hand, in Victorian Britain 1/3 of kids never reached age 5, so there is that. Also many didn't survive child labour in the coal mines.
I'm of the opinion that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" should also command the law-makers to keep it simple enough that the average person understands the rules that bind them, and also their own options if someone wrongs them. As such, I would be in favour of getting rid of every law we can.
Thing is though, lots of politicians have shared similar sentiments, and completely failed to achieve this in office. That makes me think it's harder than it sounds to avoid undesirable consequences — figuring out which laws are in the set of "some" that won't increase child (or indeed adult) mortality, for example.
> At some historical point in time that law didn't exist, and most people somehow managed so survive
Generally, existing laws either superseded pre-existing laws (which may well have been repealed by the same process) or regulatory frameworks (which may or may not be still operable).
Same reason I can't "just delete" lines of code and expect my app to compile, even though there was a time before I put the line in and where it did compile.
Although in this context, common law is more like an interpreted language like JavaScript, so the app will keep running and then randomly just stop because of the missing lines.
For e-scooters, or whatever? Might be fine, might be nobody will insure them, which means they can't be legally on the road, which might be fine (because the police just assume it is) right until someone has an accident and it gets to a court case for driving without insurance…
Don’t have to be left-wing. Liz Truss did an amazing job of flushing the country down the drain, specially considering half her short tenure was concerned with the death of the queen.
The "developing world" is a such a big cross-section that it's not really possible to correctly claim something like that will apply to all the involved countries, but despite their growing patterns, they also seem to breed a pattern of political and economic turmoil that is self-inflicted from time to time: Chile almost assembled a new constitution recently, Argentina's currency and economy is in deep trouble, Brazil is flirting with a left dictatorship while back to uncontrolled spending, etc. One thing the UK and many "legacy" brands have always offered was the sheer stability of their institutions. Brexit may have had the world at pause for a bit, but it's not really a shakedown of that base.
Devil's advocate, but India did see a significant collapse in quality of life during Covid and in it's immediate aftermath.
This is party independent as this collapse was seen in all states.
Based on HDI (both Niti Aayog and UNDP calculated), India regressed to the same developmental indicators as in 2015.
Silver lining is that institutions still exist, and if managed correctly in the next decade, could ensure rapid economic development. That said, if this is mismanaged, we'd be in a similar boat to the Philippines - strong fundamentals and institutions but horrible execution leading to it lagging well behind it's peers.
The next 10 years are crucial for India's development.
Probably, but allowing it doesn't change the surprisingly difficult time that even the middle class families in the UK are having economically (which will probably put off a lot of migrants and asylum seekers if they believed it).
Immigration may or may not help the current shortage of labour in the UK in various aspects of the economy that's likely to get worse as the population ages (more pensioners) with insufficient replacements (making the things and doing the services the pensioners might buy), given that's already a weird combination — not sure how the UK is managing to get both of these wrong at the same time, but, somehow, it is.
UK definitely needs more homes though, whatever else. Too much as a faction of income going to landlords like me…
Argentina was 100 years ago one of the richest countries on the planet. I'm not saying that such a decline will will happen to the UK, but it is myopic to suggest that it is impossible. It's only "impossible" if we actively stop it happening.
I looked into this and I don't actually see any sign that Argentina suffered any long-term decline in established GPD per capita. It had a few sharp breaks and recessions that undid 10 or 20 years of progress. But all of the stuff about 100 years of decline in Argentina economy is based on counterfactuals about how they "should have" grown, not about absolute losses.
Well yeah most people are obviously referring to relative decline, I'm surprised you even needed that explaining to you, unless you thought that Argentina really might actually be poorer today in real terms than it was in the year 1900.
> counterfactuals about how they "should have" grown
No, they were growing a lot and extremely wealthy, then they chose to go down a low growth path. Growth is not some magical thing, as if they just stopped growing for no reason as you appear to be suggesting. The point is their growth trajectory changed for very particular reasons, which were mostly things in their control.
I mean if in 100 years time the USA was the poorest country in the world but still richer than it is today in real terms, would you really go "yep, yep, nothing to see here, stop dealing in counterfactuals"? Obviously not.
This whole thread exists because a person said that they thought that the UK was going to have a lower standard of living in the future than the past. I assume you will now go direct your indignation towards them.
i don't think Argentina ever had the infrastructural or foundational sophistication of the UK. Britain is fairly nimble, it's a naturally a native English speaker country, and has many of the same values that attract businesses to the US. Argentina is a non-starter.
> Get real. This is sentiment because people are mad that the UK rejected their political beliefs.
One of the most important assets of british people used to be their national brand; it was never an accurate image of who they were as people, but the public relations carefully orchestrated by their government was effective on the international stage. Perhaps the big favour Farage did to the world was to encourage british people to speak up and show everyone what was really behind the so called exceptionalism and the superficial veneer of manners. However, it was also the irreversible deterioration of their image; and I’m not sure british people should celebrate the fact that they shocked and offended the international audience with their beliefs and values.
The past UK standard of living was based on pillaging the colonies, then after divestment of Empire it was briefly propped up in the 80s by North Sea oil and in the 00s by financial deregulation.
No shit we're not going to have the same standard of living as the past.
And how did the UK acquire the strength needed to take those colonies? Would-be conquerors are a dime a dozen, empires as successful as the British not so much
What you refer to as strength is not potent anymore: you can surprise uncontacted peoples only once, and nowadays there's UN, the Geneva Convention etc. to stop such dehumanization that enabled the colonizations.
Most colonies back then had no big picture view of the world. They had no idea what tactics were being used against them and were hyper focused on their local situation. Internecine warfare within Europe and trading across the world gave the merchant companies training and advantages that no one else in the world had. Things are quite different now.
I mean, I don't think "well, they used to have a big empire" says that much about the current state of the country. Shift the dial around a century or so, and you hit at least three other Best Empire countries (Spain, Portugal, Netherlands). I think the British empire is particularly memorable because it was basically the _last_ one (pedantically, shreds of the Portuguese one held on for a bizarrely long time, but the British one was certainly the last one to peak).
it's also probably memorable because it was the largest empire in human history with like almost a third of the world in its possession? It's arguably one of the most influential
Colonies were always irrelevant to metropolitan standards of living. See how Norway, Sweden and Denmark with tiny or non-existent empires did as well as Britain, or how Germany and Austria-Hungary were no less wealthy than France. Developing makes a country rich. Looting a non-developed country is a one time thing. Developing is ongoing.
> See how Norway, Sweden and Denmark with tiny or non-existent empires did as well as Britain, or how Germany and Austria-Hungary were no less wealthy than France.
Sweden had an empire, Austria-Hungary was an empire up till the end of WWI. Also, there was extreme poverty in Norway and Sweden not that long ago (the 19th century), leading many to emigrate to the US. The same with German emigration.
> Austria-Hungary was an empire up till the end of WWI
It was _called_ an empire, but it wasn't an empire in the same sense as the British empire; if Britain had been feeling particularly grandiose they could have called Queen Anne the Empress of England and Scotland as part of the Act of Union on a similar basis. Sweden's was also not a modern colonial empire; it economically did not work at all the same way.
> Also, there was extreme poverty in Norway and Sweden not that long ago (the 19th century), leading many to emigrate to the US.
I mean... there was in the UK, too. For the most dramatic example see the Great Famine in Ireland, but there was extreme poverty all over the UK.
Any single colony may have been irrelevant but the colonial world order was and still is relevant. All the western countries that you listed got advantage of participating in the looting, slave trade, resource extraction etc. either directly or indirectly. Even today, the western life depends on e.g. child labor in factories and cattle farming that destroys the rainforests - elsewhere.
It wasn’t just pillaging. I think the UK success was because they figured out arbitrage opportunities that no one else in the world could. That was because the rest of the world turned inwards.
Lots of good engineering talent in the UK - all the good F1 teams are based in the UK for example.
The UK has always been a merchant, trading economy - partly why Brexit was so stupid regardless of the EU's flaws, but nonetheless London is still an extremely attractive legal proposition and so on.
> London is still an extremely attractive legal proposition and so on
Yes, the libel laws have been especially helpful in allowing despots and oligarchs to move their wealth into the country and build contacts with No. 10 while suing journalists reporting on it. Chelsea FC, major football club, was owned by a Putin pal for 20 years. He was forced to sell only in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine.
Prigozhin, Wagner CEO, was able to hire a UK law firm to sue a journalist for reporting on his link to Wagner. This was after sanctions were placed on him by the UK government [0]
Agreed. There are two UKs: London and the rest, like u said. Just like USA. There's Silicon Valley and NYC plus some other enclaves and there's the "flyover".
UK has become like USA with yawning gaps between the have and have nots.
Most people are ignorant about businesses that are not international consumer brands. However this only represents a tiny fraction of the total number of businesses out there.
This visibility problem goes back to even Napolean's time, when he dismissed England as a "nation of shopkeepers". In a way he was correct, but he failed to appreciate what such a nation was and is capable of.
Having lived in multiple western EU countries and in the US, and now living in the UK, I can say that it's not developing, it's regressing.
It is baffling how bad everything is, from public services (8 months of average waiting time in the NHS for something as benign as a lumbar puncture) to worker's rights (it's literally worse than the US). And now they of course committed economic suicide with the Brexit.
I simply do not understand how anyone can think that the UK is a first-world country if they have ever lived in a real one before.
> worker's rights (it's literally worse than the US)
This seems very incorrect given that the UK has stricter laws around dismissal (the bar for losing your job is much higher), better minimum wage laws, more legally mandated holidays per year, paid time off for sickness, parental pay etc. - very basic things that the US doesn't have, at least not uniformly across states and industries.
The UK has only had a minimum wage act since 1998. So it might be better now, but taking a larger context window… not so much.
However, the social benefits around leave etc are definitely better but this is perhaps because of a more homogeneous culture than the US where some states like to work their fingers to the bone, and some states are more relaxed. The UK is definitely work hard, play hard and the only national variation seems to be the work getting done (blue vs white collar in US terms)
There are more to worker's rights than the minimum wage, and saying that "The UK has only had a minimum wage act since 1998." as if its evidence for poor worker's rights in 2023 (or at least worse than the the US's) doesn't really make sense, firstly because that was 25 years ago and plenty can change in that time, and secondly because we are comparing worker's rights in 2023, not 1998.
To be honest I'm so baffled by the idea that the US has better worker's rights than the UK that I scarcely know where to begin.
For what it's worth, Sweden and Denmark do not have minimum wages even today. So no, it's not a hugely useful proxy, otherwise according to you the US may have better worker's rights than Denmark (trivially false).
FYI, In the UK you cannot go to an employment tribunal unless you worked at a company for 2 years (except if you are explicitly fired for racist or sexist reasons). So for the vast majority of workers, there is no actual difference between the UK and "at will" hire.
Under two years of employment, which is the majority nowadays, you can essentially be fired at will.
The rest is true, but a absolutely major one that is missing in the UK is unemployment benefits. If you lose your job you basically have no income at all.
Unemployment benefits exist through UC. Most people who are unemployed, in practice, also claim a number of other benefits that substantially boost your income i.e. housing benefit (so your rent is paid), ESA (another £100/week)...this has created another set of issues where lots of people have become economically inactive rather than "unemployed"...great statistically but not so great for people...but yes, the welfare state for adults who can work in the UK is unbelievably huge (£100bn/year, almost no age groups are net contributors into the tax system anymore...I believe 30-40 are the only net contributors...I don't think the level of government support for consumption has ever been so large in the UK, and few examples in other countries...possibly Nordics before their implosion in the early 90s).
All those benefits require you to have less than £6,000 saved to be eligible, essentially ensuring you are ruined before kicking in.
Not only that, they are not available to visa holders, contrarily to most first world countries.
Lastly, the amount is still laughable. In Luxembourg I would have had 80% of my salary for a year, without conditions. The UK is not a first world country at all.
No, they don't. And £6k is not ruined because everything else is being paid for you.
Because Luxembourg has a contribution-based welfare state. The money you are being paid is your own money that is being returned to you by the state when certain conditions are met (and yes, if you look at any contribution-based system, there is heavily conditionality, universal systems are the only ones without conditionality). The UK annual benefit bill just for people of working age is larger than Luxembourg's GDP.
The UK has a universal system that everyone can access regardless of circumstances. You just don't understand how it works at all (this is quite typical, Brits do not understand contribution-based systems either because they are used to a system where the state pays out massive amounts of cash to people in excess of the amount they paid in).
Can you elaborate more on how the UK's workers rights are "literally worse than the US"? I would say things like statutory sick pay, mandatory holiday allowance, protection from unfair dismissal and the right to uninterrupted breaks are all pretty progressive compared to the States.
There is no worker protection for the first 2 years of your employment with a company, so you're essentially an at will employee (worse actually, you have less rights and still need to give notice).
You also have only laughable unemployment benefits (£85 per week), that don't depend on your contributions.
Again, completely untrue. Automatic unfair dismissal does not have a minimum tenure to be applicable. Here [1] is a handy list of protections that do not require two years. You've also conveniently ignored all the other benefits in that list that are not available in the US.
You've already been corrected by someone else on the unemployment benefits so I'll not waste time repeating that.
The UK has a lot of problems, but downplaying workers rights in comparison to the states is a strange hill to die on.
Workers rights is a mixed bag. If you are a contractor, somehow you seem to opt out - for everyone else you get a decent amount of holiday (people in the US seem to just get two weeks!?).
> I simply do not understand how anyone can think that the UK is a first-world country if they have ever lived in a real one before.
While I am fully on board with the sentiment that we are circling the drain, can you be more specific about where is actually better? I'm interested both from the perspective of potential emigration, but also trying to be rational rather than sensationalist - if I'm stuck here, I want a clearer picture of what "good" looks like.
My current sense is that a country like Switzerland is probably what most Brits would be happiest with (myself included), but that is not compatible with our national self-identity as a "major player" which is falling behind. Sometimes I think we'd be better off giving up the nukes and handing out UN security council seat to India, but that is not exactly an easy sell for a politician.
I lived in France, Luxembourg and the US, compared to the UK all feel like if you stepped 100 years in the future, especially Luxembourg.
I didn't experience much of the social services in the US so I won't expand on them, but in Luxembourg and France you get world class healthcare for free or very cheap (even for foreigners) in a timely manner, you get years of unemployment benefits, public transportation is better and cheaper (free in LU), transportation overall is better and cheaper (UK trains are notoriously horrible), etc.
So the obvious question is: what's the catch? France is the best comparison of those you mentioned - their GDP and budget deficit are similar to the UK, so where is the extra money coming from to fund this world class healthcare, generous unemployment, and higher class public transport?
The problem with the NHS is largely political. If you consider the structure of the NHS within civil/political society, it is clear why reform has been challenging.
The Tories are, for obvious reasons, totally unable to reform it. Labour are willing to do so but are inhibited by the fact that the vast majority of funding comes from unions who oppose any reform.
Worker's rights aren't "worse" than the US. It also depends what you mean, worker's rights in Denmark are "worse" than the US too...that isn't necessarily a bad thing if the system works. One of the biggest issues in the UK is that businesses are nervous about hiring people at all because firing people opens you up to virtually unlimited liability...I don't think this is a good thing, 20% of the UK's adult population are economically inactive.
>The problem with the NHS is largely political. If you consider the structure of the NHS within civil/political society, it is clear why reform has been challenging.
If you imagine all the healthcare workers in another country being unionized, it isn't a surprising outcome.
Both Blair and Cameron said that the BMA are, by far, the most powerful lobbying group in the UK (the savaging that Blair got from the BMA in 2000/01 when the spending increases were being planned caused him massive issues, and the resulting spending increases ended up creating quite a few problems because of this).
> In the UK, the preoccupations of the “elite” – by which I mean the people, left and right, in politics, government and media whose views shape those of the country – are with things like Net Zero (above all), inequality, obesity, delivering Brexit, regulating Big Tech, data ethics and privacy, cutting immigration, gender and racial pay gaps, and other priorities that are either unrelated to, or diametrically opposed to, making the country richer.
Fixing inequality obviously makes the country richer since wealth is concentrate amongst so few, redistricte that wealth to those who can't participate.
All of these things make people better off somehow.
The uk has less inequality than the US but middle class (and somewhat poor) Americans can still have better living standards in many ways just by being richer. Reducing inequality may improve median incomes a bit, but growing the economy could have a bigger impact (ideally the growth would benefit people at least reasonably equally in relative terms). Achieving net zero is much easier if you are richer and can therefore spend more on new energy generation, batteries, interconnects, car fleets, etc.
I was thinking that exactly these points were what makes a country rich(er) - citizen well-being, delivering on the promises, and such. What are your criteria for a richer country then?
> What are your criteria for a richer country then?
Uh... Having more money?
Country A is richer than Country B if and only if Country A has more money. Country B may have a great QOL, low obesity, low inequality, etc etc. But its not richer unless it has more money. That's kinda what the word means.
A "country" cannot have money, it's not a real thing. People can have money, companies can have money, government can have money, banks can have money... you need to be more precise here. My expectation is when the people (I mean regular people) have more money at their disposal, thus more access to healthcare and education and mobility and beer and such, then the country is happier and better off thus richer. Reducing the word "rich" to "money" might be the cause of your confusion, but the dictionary explains it just as well by "having high value or quality".
As does most of the educated populations of rEurope and India etc - I’m an English dev working in the EU and the fact that I speak English is of no real advantage over my peers.
Yes, this. The UK has been subsidized for several decades by the dominance of the US and as a result English. Just as Canada and others in the Anglosphere.
Tired of this ridiculous attitude you see everywhere on the internet, "stopped reading at X" (which may actually be near or at the end of the article), "he said X therefore I can now casually discredit everything he says", "he said something factually incorrect therefore the whole article is wrong and I don't have to engage with it". And the arrogance of it too, as if in your head it's virtuous enough to be so closed and simple minded that it's worth announcing it to the world by making such comments. Just utterly juvenile nonsense.
That doesn't make any sense. The point is not whether or not we should dismiss nonsense, it's that often it's the "stopped reading at X" type comments that are the real nonsense
>People don’t have time or won’t make the time. They use heuristics (“nonsense”) to sort out the (in their opinion) chaff.
They have time to make said comments. It's not that they don't have the time, but perhaps that they want their opinion to heard and their implicit supposed authority to be recognised with the minimum amount of effort.
>With the deluge of content that is available it is simply their prerogative.
It's their prerogative regardless of the amount of content available. That's irrelevant.
Yea, but that comparison literally underpins the main point of the article (Britain becoming like Poland is bad). Been to Poland recently? It's... kinda nice!
He says in 10 years Britain (currently nice) = Poland (up and coming?) = Bangladesh (not as nice)
There wasn't even a direct comparison, which again makes such "stopped reading at X" even more brain dead.
The quote that prompted the OP to discard the entire article (lol):
> A slowdown in “frontier growth” and technological progress matters a lot for the United States. But it matters less to Poland or Bangladesh – countries that are still trying to get to the frontier.
That Poland is a nice place is neither here nor there. Poland and Bangladesh are both playing catch up (objectively true). Britain used to not be playing catch up. Now it is starting to have to play catch up. That's bad.
Good policy and hard work go a lot further when there's steady funding and guaranteed market access to support that. I'm not attributing all of Poland's advances to the EU, just mentioning that Poland's trajectory was upwards due in part to these factors. Factors that the UK does not currently have in its favour.
I'm from Poland, I've worked for UK company for several years and lived there from time to time. I disagree with the article main thesis. UK will still be more wealthy in 30 years, simply because wealth and GDP is not the same. Country wealth is a portion of each years' GDP accumulated over centuries - so Poland has decades to go even accounting for the depreciation of money and old infrastructure).
People focus on GDP a lot, but wealth is just as important - because wealth creates opportunities and innovation. When Poland transformed from communism to capitalism most people had savings for less than a month. Nobody was rich. You can't do a startup or a company if you start starving after 1 month without income. And don't get me started about trying to get a credit when your only asset is house you share with 6 other people in the middle of post-communist nowhere.
This changed in last 20 years, but we still got long way to go.
People in the west are blind to how wealthy they are, and how many opportunities it creates. I worked for a small family company in UK that did embedded devices for blind people. 2 students after university created it because a father of one of them got blind. It's still hard to do in Poland. In 90s it was impossible for 99.9% of the population.
Anyway - I also disagree with your characterization of Polish economic boom. The EU contribution to Poland started at about 2.5% of GDP and is currently around 1% yearly. It's nice to have, but it's not the determining factor. Polish export to EU is over 33% of GDP for comparison. It grew over 20 times since 2004.
It's not the donations that keep countries in EU, it's the trade.
> When Poland transformed from communism to capitalism most people had savings for less than a month. Nobody was rich. You can't do a startup or a company if you start starving after 1 month without income.
Ok, but that's modern britain. Millions of people can't save money and are far from rich. Plenty will starve after one month of no income. News reports seem to indicate quite a few already do even if they are employed.
> In 90s it was impossible for 99.9% of the population.
99% of the british or western population doesn't start a startup either. That's why people resent the 1%. The main reason people in east europe don't have the culture of starting startups is due to the communist model that supressed the natural human tendency of doing trade and innovation. It's simple as that. Now that that's gone, Poland and the rest of the former bloc, are acquiring a taste for it.
You are right about wealth accumulation though. That's why countries such as Italy or Greece for instance seem developed. Not having had a war in a long time, they were able to build their infrastructure and benefit from it. Let alone Britain that managed to accumulate wealth, by means we all know. Now that the same means can't be employed it would appear that a long, cold, period of decline lies ahead. Let's see how well these countries can handle the sea of change about to come. I bet they won't be as resilient and determined as, say Poland, which only as recently as 30 years became free and achieved so much. To put it into perspective you are probably older than your country was free.
West Europe lacks that determination. The US and East Europe (and a few others) have it. The future, I believe, belongs to them.
I'm Polish and I had trouble figuring out why would the two countries be put side by side like that, but this:
> If the UK continues with the same rate of growth it has enjoyed over the last decade, then Poland will be richer than Britain in about 12 years’ time.
I find unlikely. I mean, we're doing good economically wise, but not that good. We're going to catch up to Greece and Portugal soon enough - just like the Czech Republic did, but e.g. Italy is out of reach anywhere in the near future.
> I'm Polish and I had trouble figuring out why would the two countries be put side by side like that,
Because the author is firmly in the camp that fails to aknowledge any and all progress made by east european countries, and by Poland in particular. Wouldn't fit the narrative of a brexit campaign focused on slandering those nations and their citizens.
Furthermore, putting it next to Bangladesh, or India, the author thinks, may make the damage done to former colonies of west european "powers" less obvious. The reality of east europe, and poland in particular, being significantly more developed than the rest of the world - much of which has suffered at the hands of said "powers" - is irrelevant.
That particular line of text discredits the whole article, which in my view, doesn't belong here. It belongs at most on the dailymail, or perhaps the guardian - another library of content that tirelessly portrairs east europeans as some sort of underclass worthy of pitty and scarecrow.
But you know, in Poland, a country with an ever growing economy, eggs are not rationed. So perhaps the author is right in way that Poland may overtake the UK, sooner rather than later. Personally I have full confidence it will.
> But you know, in Poland, a country with an ever growing economy, eggs are not rationed. So perhaps the author is right in way that Poland may overtake the UK, sooner rather than later. Personally I have full confidence it will.
I don't think it will happen during my lifetime in nominal terms(so e.g. GDP per capita), but to me personally it doesn't matter, because my quality of life is already where I want it to be. Arguably it's even better at home, because here I can at least afford real estate.
There are two categories of countries. There's the richest country on earth, which actually has to innovate to grow even richer, and then there are countries that merely have to catch up. The UK, Poland and Bangladesh are in the latter category.
In order for a country to be developing, it has to develop itself first. If we look at the pace UK develops, a better term would be a stagnating country.
>Britain isn’t a developing country, it’s a regressing one.
There's so much research on developing countries, but I find deteriorating countries more interesting. There are many countries that used to be first world, and simply are not anymore. Argentina is the classic example, South Africa is the most heated example.
The fact my dad grew up in Venezuela when it was the 4th wealthiest nation in the world per capita (granted, Europe was recovering from WW2) blows my mind. It was still top 20 by the 70s. [0]
Norway is probably the best managed petrostate. The key appears to be directing revenues into foreign investment and use the gains to pay for social programs over long periods of time, rather than dumping money into your economy.
1. The foreign policy decisions made by administrations during the Cold War are no longer implemented anymore. The Cold War is as distant in 2023 as WW2 was in 1980.
The world in 2023 is different from the world in the 1970s which is different from the world in the 1940s.
2. The institutional changes that caused Venezuela's dramatic slide only really began to take hold in the 2000s, and were exacerbated by the global collapse in commodity prices in the 2012-15 period.
3. Plenty of petro-states across South and Central America have in 2023 reached a state of development comparable to eastern members of the EU (ie. In the 0.7 or high development range).
4. GDP per capita is a crummy metric to compare economic development. GDP (and ergo per capita GDP) are metrics to benchmark production, not social development, which are better measured when looking at metrics such as HDI, Life Expectancy, Literacy Rate, Median Income, Childhood Mortality Rate, etc.
Even though Venezuela had a very high GDP per capita in the late 1970s/early 1980s, it was extremely unevenly distributed. In fact, in the time period that Venezeula had the 4th highest GDP per capita, it's Gini Coefficient (the metric for wealth inequality) was 0.500 [0]. This is in line with Angola and Zimbabwe today, and was much worse than other nations across South America.
By that time period, the kind of interventions you saw in Chile, Guatemala, etc were not as vogue, with the Iran-Contra Scandal acting as the final nail in the coffin for any direct clandestine intervention.
Venezuela's problems today are caused by Venezuela's leaders mismanaging the economic dividend in the 2000s and elites on both sides of the aisle in Venezeula working to undermine institutions to their benefit.
> The key appears to be directing revenues into foreign investment and use the gains to pay for social programs over long periods of time, rather than dumping money into your economy.
Which was a policy suggested by an Iraqi (Farouk al-Kasim) to the Norwegian government. [0]
It's only hard to be a "petronation" if you make it hard. The USA produces more oil and natural gas than any other country in the world, and we seem to be doing well enough. Similar for Canada.
And the Taliban is back in power now, with a population that is more impoverished [1] than before the US invasion. So the US brought 20 years of war and suffering [2] and then left the country to resume under the same government they originally overthrew but now worse off.
[1] > The United States war in Afghanistan continues destroying lives due to the war-induced breakdown of the economy, public health, security, and infrastructure. Afghans have been massively improverished by the conflict. 92% of the population faces some level of food insecurity and 3 million children are at risk of acute malnutrition. Some regions are currently facing famine. At least half the population is living on less than $1.90 per day.
The UK may be still high up, but the problem is the apparent downward trend.
The whole point, as I understand it, is to research what happens in the (still) rich and advanced nations which (slowly) lose their riches and advancements.
Based on world bank data and taking into account PPP[1], UK real gdp rose 14% from 2010 to 2021. Belgium, Germany, Netherlands were up 15%. Norway 18%, Switzerland 19%, Denmark 20%, Sweden 25%. The UK was close to the EU average.
Results are similar if you ignore PPP. [2]
I’m not really sure where your numbers came from but I assume the ranking is a bit sensitive to the time boundaries (ie recovery from gfc and pandemic) so I don’t know how relevant it would be even if I had found the same results as you.
I found the uk looks a bit better for growth from 2010 to 2019, which ignores some pandemic recovery failures mentioned in the OP and Germany’s larger 2009-2010 growth.
This article is missing an important part in the relationship between the developed world and the developing world which is exploitation. When companies start offshoring to the UK for cheap labor or taking its resources for pennies on the dollar we can start calling it a proper developing country.
Growing up I assumed the UK was pretty rich. But then when you look at the stats, the UK is about as wealthy as Mississippi, one of the poorest states. Learning that people with college degrees in the UK make 25k GBP, and that is considered good, sure isn't that bad when GBP was worth 2x USD. But people are living in London for those salaries. The big expensive cities in the US, like NYC pay you much more to compensate for the high cost of living.
In the US I know people with GEDs working Plumbing, HVAC, Electrical, Diesel Mechanics, etc. making $100k-150k in areas where a house in the nice neighborhood cost $200k. So the fact that you have people making so little in London where it costs a million to buy a house really shows how bad the UK has it.
A college degree in what? 18 years ago I started graduate life in London on £21k.
I assume it's far higher these days.
Tradespeople can earn fortunes anywhere. I can recall Ireland during the 'Celtic Tiger' phase bricklayers were absolutely milking it. I actually regret I don't have a trade under my belt.
£25k/year isn't good, most social science grads from lower-ranked unis will make more than this. The only exceptions tend to be jobs that select heavily from groups with inherited wealth (journalism, PR, politics, etc.).
There are plumbers in the UK who don't work full-time and make £300k/year (Pimlico Plumbers, notoriously, pay massive salaries because they do a lot of on-call work in central London). It doesn't cost a million to buy a house in most of London, they just built the Elizabeth line which goes fairly deep outside central London so you can live outside and work inside quite easily.
This is not to say that there aren't issues with wages, with house prices but they are significantly more complex than people outside the UK think...who will often compare tech salaries outside London with those in SF, as if people working in tech in WV are earning the same as in SF (this is particularly strange because most of the companies in SF have offices in London where they pay the same amounts).
Was your source of those £300k “salaries” the Daily Mail and Express “articles” that came out just before the then company owner announced a bid to become mayor of London in 2021?
I heard that is turnover for the “employee”, not a salary, and you have to account for VAT, paying the company for admin/ marketing and other business expenses etc which are no small sums
No, it comes from living in Pimlico, and knowing how much these people are making.
No, it isn't. Again, this comes from knowing what these people are actually making rather than Googling furiously to prove someone wrong online. You can find endless articles about this though, emergency plumbers make a lot of money, Pimlico Plumbers have been paying these kind of salaries for decades.
Ah ok your source is “trust me bro”. Though I admit with it being salary information, it’s not the easiest to cite.
I was trying to find sources, not prove you wrong. I was genuinely curious and very very skeptical at those are huge sums even for a plumber in central London.
Important to keep in mind that it has a per capita income similar to Mississippi, not wealth.
Wealth can mean many things, but it is often associated with your savings more than your income. If you go by median wealth per adult, the UK is still wealthier than the US as a whole (#11 globally vs #21). The mean is another story, but that is no doubt influenced by the fact that there are many extremely wealthy people in the US.
> Growing up I assumed the UK was pretty rich. But then when you look at the stats, the UK is about as wealthy as Mississippi, one of the poorest states.
From that, I conclude that Mississippi isn’t one of the poorest, but one of the least rich states of the US, not that the UK isn’t pretty rich.
Some engineering graduates get paid astonishingly low amounts of money but they are also typically the kind of dime-a-dozen grads with no particularly interesting skills.
“I know people” on such a upper-middle class board is bound to give a skewed picture if you compare your anecdotes with the median of whatever the other side is.
> Learning that people with college degrees in the UK make 25k GBP,
They mostly don't; if you annualize the UK median weekly earnings with a degree from 2016-2017, you get GBP 30,524. (Unfortunately, this isn’t a regularly-published breakdown.)
> In the US I know people with GEDs working Plumbing, HVAC, Electrical, Diesel Mechanics, etc. making $100k-150k in areas where a house in the nice neighborhood cost $200k.
The people you know aren’t a representative sample.
Annual mean wage for construction (skilled and unskilled) nationally in the US in 2022 is around $60,000 [0] so around £45,000, compared to £28,500 [1] for the same time period in the UK for skilled construction (in the US, there isn't a difference between construction worker and bricklayer). The US and UK are both large so there will be significant regional variation (eg. earning $100-130k in construction in Philly is realistic, as is £40-50k for a similar role in Greater London)
For college educated people, the median wage in the US (in 2022) is around $71,000/£54,000 [2] compared to (in 2019) £34,000 in the UK [3]
Note that almost all Americans get health insurance from either their employer or via Medicaid with around 8% of Americans lacking any sort of insurance [4], but even then in most cases they would most likely be covered by subsidized prices [5], so it would be a wash comparing with the NHS or using that as a justification when even Australia, Canada, and NZ have much higher salaries compared to the UK despite having a similar healthcare system.
Big picture, it appears that if you are skilled or semi-skilled, you can earn significantly more in the US than the UK.
Nobody I know in the UK considers £25k "good" salary. That's an entry level salary for most industry and profession.
Hell, the legal minimum wage annualizes to £20k
Also you can't compare industry the way you are. There are LOTS of individual plumbers,electricians,... in the UK making £100k-£200k+ ... I know a few of them. It is a running joke how much the trades get paid. I know a window cleaner that makes £500k running a window cleaning business.
That's the same everywhere.
I'm also sure there are people in New York, NY struggling to afford a tiny one bed apartment ... just like London.
I'm not defending the UK, I am attacking your poor reasoning.
I agree with much of this article, but just as a counterpoint:
> Americans could stop working each year on September 20th and they’d still be richer than Britons working for the whole year.
...and yet the average American almost never stops working. That car wash manager in Alabama gets three weeks of PTO per year, and probably earns every cent of their $125k -- Buc-ee's is a pretty demanding employer, I think?
Of course I would like to see the UK import the average GDP of the US, but I'm not sure I want the social structures that go along with it. I would rather be importing those from our former friends in the EU, with whom we actually have a lot more in common with culturally than we like to admit.
* Annual energy use per person in the US is 77,000 kWh; in the UK it’s 30,000 kWh.
* Annual electricity generation per person is 12,700 kWh; in the UK it’s 4,800 kWh.
Consuming/generating less energy is a good thing, no? If we presume energy is the limiting factor, then the other bullet points suddenly look a little different. For example, productivity: US $0.96/MWh²; UK $1.65/MWh².
No. Throughout human history, consuming more energy has always been one of the best and most direct ways to improve living standards. Some current methods of energy production have negative externalities but that is a solvable problem.
> But there is one problem. There is virtually no recognition of how bad things are among British elites
Not just elites - ordinary british people too. I've been saying for 10 years that britain is falling behing the rest fo Europe.
I give real examples from my life, "In Czech republic I/anyone has access to Proton therapy and housing is better built, but in Britain protin therapy is missing (was first built last year, ex-communist CZ has it for like 20 years) and quality housing is only accessible to millionairs."
And if I am taling to a british person, there is like a 50% chance they will get offended and respond like "well then why are you here". I had similar responce on this very forum.
And when "locals" bring this up publically, they get accused of 'talking britain down'. Kind of came up in the brexit debate under 'project fear'.
I feel it will get a lot worse before people will finally get their sputnic moment and realise they are in a hole.
When comparing with places like Czech Republic, people often forget that most of this area in "Eastern Europe" (this isn't Eastern Europe really) was very well-industralized until the mid-20th century when things went very wrong.
So it is true, places like the Czech Republic have done well versus the UK...they have good policies in place, they are doing sensible things. For some reason though, the comparison is never made with places like Spain or Italy, most East European countries are now ahead of them and Britain is still ahead of them too. Even more strangely, no-one is suggesting that we should be more like these countries either...that we should be friendly to business, that we should limit immigration...strange, isn't it?
People outside the UK talk a lot about Brexit, the reason why it isn't really mentioned outside Westminster in the UK is because it isn't that important. We don't export much to the EU (we consume far more), it isn't a huge consumer market, it is shrinking, and there has been no real noticeable impact...even in industries that were going to be "decimated" (such as meat processing)...it isn't happened. There has just been no real impact to speak of. The only exception was NI, which was a situation designed by the EU in order to place pressure on voters ahead of the 2019 election...which didn't work, and which has largely been unwound now that the EU has seen sense (and after several terrorist attacks in NI largely due to, well justified, fears that the EU was motivated by Ireland's desire to seize their country). After 2019, all the rhetoric basically disappeared because all the people pushing for a second referendum discovered they didn't have a job anymore (and everyone else who kept their job, said they never really supported a second referendum at all).
> we should be more like these countries either...that we should be friendly to business, that we should limit immigration...strange, isn't it?
I've run a startup in UK and my family has a company in CZ, Britain is so much more friendly to business from my experience.
> there has been no real noticeable impact...even in industries that were going to be "decimated" [by brexit]
What is the basis for your opinion?
I have been unable to get goods from EU because of customs. I cannot post thing back to my family because now you get charged VAT for sending gifts by post to EU. I have never met a person that deals with import or export who was not dismayed by this.
Because you have never worked for a large business. It is almost impossible to build anything anywhere, there are massive amounts of regulations if you do get started, interventions from multiple levels of government, it is genuinely mad. Look at mortgages, you have the government telling private banks to bail out mortgage-holders...do you think this would happen in Czechia? Just think about is happening: bank executives were summoned to No.10, they were told they were going to have to lose billions of pounds a year to pay for people's mortgages, they accepted this completely...is this normal?
...what? Stop for a second and think about what you are saying. Do you believe that one of the largest export markets for the EU was suddenly shut down overnight?
The rules with VAT are unrelated to Brexit, and were largely due to the staggering levels of VAT fraud occurring with imports from China. If you are sending things to relatives, you do not pay VAT...that isn't what it is for.
Baffling. I don't even know what to say at this point. You don't understand how any of this stuff works, why rules were change, these points should be obviously wrong to you with even the slightest application of logic.
Okay, you claim your weird points...look at the results of any public company that trades with Europe. You have companies that run cross-border meat processing, something that was supposed to be impossible after Brexit...none reported any impact (because they prepared their documents, and this was something that most of these companies were already doing because...surprise, surprise...the EU does not encompass the whole world, and they traded in and outside of the EU already).
> Because you have never worked for a large business
I am working for a large mutinational right now
> It is almost impossible to build anything anywhere
ye the british planning system for real estate is insane.
But if you want to build motorcycles, certify them as roadworthy and sell them, it's really easy.
> you have the government telling private banks to bail out mortgage-holders...
Let me ask you a question, if those. mortgage holder go under en masse, and yhe housing market starts collapsing, will the banks be calling the government?
> The rules with VAT are unrelated to Brexit,
You are charged VAT on all imports. When we qyit customs union, podt from my family became imports. This has nothing to do with China.
> You don't understand how any of this stuff works
The UK has almost no natural resources. As the developing world increases their heavy industry and engineering capacity, knowledge workers from the UK will be needed less and less. The UK also did quite a bit of lending to the developing world, and there's much more competition in that marketplace now as well.
The comparison made between the UK and US states is one I was thinking about lately and which prompted me to make a little "compare EU countries to US states" app: https://evmar.github.io/states/
(For example, through it I discovered that Ireland's nearest twin in both land and population is South Carolina.)
Looking at the UK specifically, it's the GDP of California but with almost 2x the population, which comes out to a GDP per capita comparable to Mississippi.
I think one of the things that’s missing from these conversations is that whilst UK wages are far lower than the US, median wealth is actually way higher [1]. I would argue that this means that the UK is very much a country that is on a backslide, rather than a developing one. The other issue is that so much of our economy is limited to London. This would be less of a problem if we were a country like Greece where basically everyone lived in the major city, but the bulk of the population is spread throughout the rest of the UK. The UK has significant ongoing political issues that will take a long time to resolve, and it will take a long time for our relationship with the EU to return to some stable arrangement.
Pointing out the salary of a car wash manager at an Alabama Buc-ees is cherry picking to the extreme. There are exactly 3 of those jobs in Alabama. It's not like it's a common job. The actual median income in Alabama is 27K almost 50% less than UK median income.
From the article:
>>With the exception of a few sectors like AI, we are so far behind the frontier in terms of economic development that worrying about (...)
Considering that computing makes increasing use of neural networks, and that the new phase in capitalism will arguably be based almost entirely on this type of infrastructure, it seems to me, in fact, that the statement is contradictory in itself, paradoxical.
Britain is a failed state. It might be the first truly modern state to properly fail.
Many will blame Brexit, but the writing has been on the wall for decades. Most of my friends in Britain have been either biding their time for retirement, trying to go literally anywhere else, or in a deep sort of quiet depression, usually aided by alcohol. These are well to do, white collar workers.
It will be interesting to watch the country decline. Will we see the rise of extremists in Parliament? Will Parliament even matter? Will Britain become a proxy for reverse colonialism in the way that Italy has? Can the financial might of London persist, or will there be an exodus?
> Britain is a failed state. It might be the first truly modern state to properly fail.
The UK is nothing like a “failed state” (the monopoly on legitimate violence is not seriously in doubt.) It may be experiencing decline in relative economic condition, but that’s hardly novel.
> My claim is that the UK is now a lot more like Poland than it is like the United States in terms of the kinds of growth it needs to do – driven by improved use of existing technology and inputs, and accumulation of capital, rather than driven primarily by technological advancement.
The author goes on to never support this thesis, and instead complains about British politics and that UK growth isn't quite as fast as the US.
The UK has a higher GDP per capita than France. They are in no way a "developing" country.
Does the UK need more tractors? Is there high unemployment (labor underutilized)? It does not seem so. What are the inputs and technology that the UK needs to improve?
GDP per capita is a poor measure. I have seen things this year that I would never have thought I'd see outside of wartime. Ambulances never showing up or taking half a day if they do. Rationing of basic vegetables at the store. The return of diseases of vitamin deficiency.
That's valid, but orthogonal. If you want to claim that British society is collapsing, I think you could write a convincing blog post.
But don't try to claim that the UK's economy is structured more like Bangladesh than the US. Or, if you do, at least directly support that claim with some facts.
I travelled the world and learned a long time ago that the world, as viewed through macroeconomic lenses, is pure delusion. GDP does not correlate with actual quality of life by any stretch of the imagination. The definition of "developed" versus "developing" is purely arbitrary. Life is highly context-dependent, i.e. there are plenty of places and people in developed countries who are much worse off than some places in "developing" countries (try comparing crime + cost of living in Baltimore to Lviv). Furthermore, the religion of "economic growth at all costs" is considered harmful. Wellbeing is not measurable in dollars. Even adjusted purchasing power fails to take into account cultural expectations of ownership (say, for example, necessity of owning a car).
The US was first to deploy large-scale electrification, and settled on 110 V @ 50 Hz. Everyone who wasn't buying their equipment from the US saw some flaws and went for 230 +- 10 V @ 60 Hz. First movers often end up committing to a suboptimal first draft version.
The UK has a lot of these. The railways are notoriously expensive and inadequate because they're over a century old, and we're designed for a different society with different traffic patterns. The housing stock wasn't affected that much but The War, and many of the larger older houses were built with the assumption that they're would be servants living there too. Heavy industry was reliant on a lot of manual labour, and didn't mechanise when the opportunity arose.
The biggest problem is that democracy arose in the age of the humanities, when the sciences were idle curiosities for eccentrics. The revolutions in England - which negatively affected the rest of the archipelago - happened in the seventeenth century, too early for an urban middle class to have its say. The political establishment still has too many landowners - too much power is feels by the descendents of warlords. Most of the power is held by former members of Oxbridge debating societies, who've never had to do anything than throw ideas about. The Civil Service is run by a core of 'generalists' with humanities degrees, with subordinate groups of 'specialists' who can never rise to the top.
The same problem afflicts business: the country is run by people who are barely competent in arithmetic. US politicians are accused of insider trading and gerrymandering; British politicians don't have the skills needed to commit these crimes. Boris Johnson needed epidemiologists to explain percentages to him; the water companies have debts that are almost equal to the dividends they've paid out since privatisation.
The solution is not political, but rather economic. Many of these businesses can be undercut by the use of industry knowledge. Software startups are cheap to run if the founders have a deep understanding of the problem, can build much of the solution themselves, and know who their customers are. In manufacturing, the Midlands and the North have long histories and community cultures surrounding these industries, and are desperate for someone to bring the factories back.
Once technical people have money, the politicians can be bought. They're surprisingly cheap.
In a mathematical sense, the problem is solved. We just need to stop waiting for the lawyers and classical philologists to do technical work, and do it ourselves. We're not getting value out of our elites, so we should get better ones.
Sounds about right from what I've experienced on the ground.
The sheer lack of respect that Brits have for techncial and scientific education is insane. It seems everyone in the UK is trying to target some sort of Finance or Consulting adjacent role or some sort of Government role.
Almost every decisionmaker that I interacted with there appears to be some kind of an Econ, Classics, or Law grad, while similar roles in the US or Canada would have someone with a STEM degree or military service experience.
236 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadEven if it is, the UK has a history of fumbling such things. There was a time when the UK was fairly clearly the world leader in civil nuclear energy (MAGNOX, AGR), airliners (in particular the Comet), and civilian computers (LEO-1), more or less all at the same time. This... didn't last.
It's a large-ish, English speaking country, with plenty of other countries nearby, that isn't North America.
If you really meant the G8, well, the UK for all it's faults is still somewhere I'd rather live than Russia.
(I didn't feel this way 5 years ago. My views on the current state and future trajectories of both the UK and Russia have changed significantly over the past few years.)
Russia’s government has been very stable for the last couple decades, with little change in substantive authority even in the inter-Putin period when Medvedev was nominally President; certainly much less substantive change than in the UK.
(One might reasonably suspect its the kind of stability produced by a brittle regime that does not bend and is thus more likely to catastrophically break, though.)
A failed coup attempt is not a coup.
I don't pretend to know what actually was going on in that very curious affair, so I refrain from calling it anything. I think that's generally a good way to proceed, rather than parroting the narrative that is propagated by the Western media (who were clearly salivating at the prospect of a 'coup').
I've seen that you say that you are British. I hope you are reading more than just the British (and US) media before commenting on affairs in countries that the UK is hostile to. Particularly in the case of the British media, that is more hostile to Russia than even the US (British animosity towards Russia goes back hundreds of years).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/10/world/europe/putin-prigoz...
I certainly wouldn't have wanted to live in Russia in the 90s, as it was a horrible time for the country. But Russia is vastly improved now, while I see the UK as going, quite quickly, in the opposite direction.
And as I also said, this is a fairly new sentiment for me. I have become very disappointed with where the UK is heading and frankly sickened by the actions of its governments, most prominently, in the last 18 months, its warmongering and peace-breaking in Ukraine but of course, it was also a prime instigator of the warmongering in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan and many other prior examples. But also, which is important for living there, the negative actions of its governments on its own people.
I still have a great affinity and regard for the British people and British culture but the country itself is sadly now in a very sorry state, thanks to its quite awful 'establishment' (governments, banks, intelligence agencies, media, etc).
The one thing that I am unsure about with living in Russia is living so deep inside a continent. I live on the coast of Australia (like most Australians) and my affinity is generally for coastal living or island countries. So the UK has appeal to me there. If I did have to live in the UK its west coast would be the most appealing prospect for me.
For me, a gay man, living in Russia is a real risk to my life with it's rampant violent homophobia, in a way that I feel pretty safe living in UK (or Australia, where I am from).
But sure, I guess the Russian economy is on the way up? The private military market is booming!
Fair enough, although I would only add a mildly sceptical note that perhaps the 'violent homophobia' is less rampant than is reported in Western media. We are fed a huge diet of anti Russian propaganda in the West. I haven't looked into this matter personally but I would imagine that it would be good to try to find out what ordinary gay men in Russia say about how the situation actually is on the ground (versus what is said in the western press). But certainly, Russia is a more 'socially conservative' country. Although, as you probably know, being gay and being socially conservative are not necessarily antagonistic positions (cf. the great number of gay men in the clergy).
> Australia, where I am from
I'd wondered if you might also be. Partly because I saw your comment elsewhere about not wanting to live in North America & not liking its aesthetic. I feel the same way and it's probably quite common for those who leave Australia and choose the UK over the US out of English speaking countries.
> But sure, I guess the Russian economy is on the way up?
Yes, and I could make quite a case for why that's true. Let me know if you want me to assemble such a case.
Where you live is heavily loaded towards your personal preference, rather than any sort of objective economical measure. Personally, I only want to live in an English speaking country (I don't want to be a language-guest in a country). I want to live somewhere where there's "lots" going on - plenty of work opportunities and fun things to do outside of work. I don't want to live in North America because I just don't like the aesthetic.
Military importance is a big one. Part of the reason Japan and Korea industrialized so quickly after 1950 was because the West supported them economically as they were needed as a reliable bulwark against Communist expansion. The US also tolerates dictatorships worldwide (incl S Korea until 1988) if the regime is friendly to the US.
That said, even when I was a kid on Vancouver Island (the 2000s), we always had plenty of UK transplants working at VIHA, schools, corporate jobs, and blue collar jobs, and I've heard similar stories from coworkers of mine in Australia and NZ (eg. our head of Sales for ANZ was a First Class Honours LLB grad from a Russell's Group uni, but felt the wages and opportunity working for a Magic Circle firm were less than that if he went to Australia)
This is a regression though, university used to be free from 1976-1998.
It has problems for sure, but other EU countries have the same problems.
Seeing the continental Europe is currently being baked dry, I'm kind of glad that the weather in Scotland is miserable.
But they missed their window after Brexit to strike the trade deals they needed, and now any trade deal they make will probably be under quite unfavorable terms.
That was always going to be the case. Brexit fantasists thought they were going to recreate the empire with UK at its center. They also thought they could do a deal with USA. What does UK offer USA if they're not in Europe?
Trade deals are multi-year projects and the terms you can get depends on how much leverage you have. Its noy the kind of thing you jump into after leaving a bigger trade bloc. The UK wasn't going to be able to negotiate anything without the bargaining chip of duty-free access to 500m customers.
It's unclear that there ever was such a window, given the _sort_ of Brexit they did. By far the most important trade goal for Britain would have been maintaining access to the European market on similar terms to previously (or at least similar terms to, say, Switzerland); everything else paled in comparison. But the form of Brexit chosen made that impossible.
Why would the UKs living standards increase? Because the world continues to get richer.
Is the UK going to regress to developing world status? That's a heck of a claim. Has any country that was among the richest in the world regressed to developing nation status? This is supposed to happen on the basis of being marginally disadvantaged in trade negotiations?
Get real. This is sentiment because people are mad that the UK rejected their political beliefs. Could the UK suffer negative consequences versus the counterfactual as a result of Brexit? Sure. Is it going to regress to being the equivalent of, like, Peru? Obviously no.
Lexically, tats an oxymoron, if you are regressing you are clearly not developing.
Empirically, living standards have been falling in UK for a decade, while developing countries are developing. Clearly, eventually they will intersect.
Logically, you seem to claim that a developed economy cannot collapse no matter how badly it's mismanaged?
I don't think that "being out of the EU" is in the same category.
1 - for the past 7 years, the government was doing nothing except infighting around brexit. Things like economic policy have been neglected. Straighforward non-political ssues, like the fact that wind farms wait for 10 years to be connected to the grid, are unaddressed.
2 - the current leadership is braindead. They have spent the past few months discussing how they will get rid of all EU laws in one fell swoop, without replacing them or analysing impact.
But they cannot answer basic questions - what happens in areas of economy that rely on EU law?
Like logically, what happens when you repeal EU law about ebikes? Do ebikes become illegal? Do all ebikes, even with 10 horsepower become legal? I hate the EU ebike law but you cant just delete it.
Good, good, so now that you have deleted 50 years of law from UK, what are those things you've just legalised?
Certainly some types of Money laundering, probably a few types of financial fraud, carcinogens in food, and driving high-powered electric motorbikes without any kind of training or licence?
> Most people somehow managed so survive
Most people survived World War 2, and in Nagasaki most people survived getting nuked. In fact at least 50% of the population manages to survive almost anything.
On the other hand, in Victorian Britain 1/3 of kids never reached age 5, so there is that. Also many didn't survive child labour in the coal mines.
Thing is though, lots of politicians have shared similar sentiments, and completely failed to achieve this in office. That makes me think it's harder than it sounds to avoid undesirable consequences — figuring out which laws are in the set of "some" that won't increase child (or indeed adult) mortality, for example.
Generally, existing laws either superseded pre-existing laws (which may well have been repealed by the same process) or regulatory frameworks (which may or may not be still operable).
Although in this context, common law is more like an interpreted language like JavaScript, so the app will keep running and then randomly just stop because of the missing lines.
For e-scooters, or whatever? Might be fine, might be nobody will insure them, which means they can't be legally on the road, which might be fine (because the police just assume it is) right until someone has an accident and it gets to a court case for driving without insurance…
It doesn’t take a lot for a country to go down the tubes.
This is party independent as this collapse was seen in all states.
Based on HDI (both Niti Aayog and UNDP calculated), India regressed to the same developmental indicators as in 2015.
Silver lining is that institutions still exist, and if managed correctly in the next decade, could ensure rapid economic development. That said, if this is mismanaged, we'd be in a similar boat to the Philippines - strong fundamentals and institutions but horrible execution leading to it lagging well behind it's peers.
The next 10 years are crucial for India's development.
I don't see how you propose to maintain the same level of prosperity when fewer productive workers need to support more unproductive seniors.
Immigration may or may not help the current shortage of labour in the UK in various aspects of the economy that's likely to get worse as the population ages (more pensioners) with insufficient replacements (making the things and doing the services the pensioners might buy), given that's already a weird combination — not sure how the UK is managing to get both of these wrong at the same time, but, somehow, it is.
UK definitely needs more homes though, whatever else. Too much as a faction of income going to landlords like me…
> counterfactuals about how they "should have" grown
No, they were growing a lot and extremely wealthy, then they chose to go down a low growth path. Growth is not some magical thing, as if they just stopped growing for no reason as you appear to be suggesting. The point is their growth trajectory changed for very particular reasons, which were mostly things in their control.
I mean if in 100 years time the USA was the poorest country in the world but still richer than it is today in real terms, would you really go "yep, yep, nothing to see here, stop dealing in counterfactuals"? Obviously not.
One of the most important assets of british people used to be their national brand; it was never an accurate image of who they were as people, but the public relations carefully orchestrated by their government was effective on the international stage. Perhaps the big favour Farage did to the world was to encourage british people to speak up and show everyone what was really behind the so called exceptionalism and the superficial veneer of manners. However, it was also the irreversible deterioration of their image; and I’m not sure british people should celebrate the fact that they shocked and offended the international audience with their beliefs and values.
No shit we're not going to have the same standard of living as the past.
Sweden had an empire, Austria-Hungary was an empire up till the end of WWI. Also, there was extreme poverty in Norway and Sweden not that long ago (the 19th century), leading many to emigrate to the US. The same with German emigration.
It was _called_ an empire, but it wasn't an empire in the same sense as the British empire; if Britain had been feeling particularly grandiose they could have called Queen Anne the Empress of England and Scotland as part of the Act of Union on a similar basis. Sweden's was also not a modern colonial empire; it economically did not work at all the same way.
> Also, there was extreme poverty in Norway and Sweden not that long ago (the 19th century), leading many to emigrate to the US.
I mean... there was in the UK, too. For the most dramatic example see the Great Famine in Ireland, but there was extreme poverty all over the UK.
The UK has always been a merchant, trading economy - partly why Brexit was so stupid regardless of the EU's flaws, but nonetheless London is still an extremely attractive legal proposition and so on.
Yes, the libel laws have been especially helpful in allowing despots and oligarchs to move their wealth into the country and build contacts with No. 10 while suing journalists reporting on it. Chelsea FC, major football club, was owned by a Putin pal for 20 years. He was forced to sell only in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine.
Prigozhin, Wagner CEO, was able to hire a UK law firm to sue a journalist for reporting on his link to Wagner. This was after sanctions were placed on him by the UK government [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jan/31/russia-ukraine-w...
This article is valid for UK-sans-London, but we shouldn't pretend that London is suddenly Warsaw
UK has become like USA with yawning gaps between the have and have nots.
Most people are ignorant about businesses that are not international consumer brands. However this only represents a tiny fraction of the total number of businesses out there.
This visibility problem goes back to even Napolean's time, when he dismissed England as a "nation of shopkeepers". In a way he was correct, but he failed to appreciate what such a nation was and is capable of.
AIUI, American citizens must eat broken glass once a year under the name "filling taxes".
Many nations in Europe require businesses to eat broken glass just to do basic business functions - Spain is astonishingly non-functional.
By contrast, most British citizens have very little red tape to contend with, and what form-filling does exist can be done easily online.
Creating a company takes an hour and has a very light annual burden.
It is baffling how bad everything is, from public services (8 months of average waiting time in the NHS for something as benign as a lumbar puncture) to worker's rights (it's literally worse than the US). And now they of course committed economic suicide with the Brexit.
I simply do not understand how anyone can think that the UK is a first-world country if they have ever lived in a real one before.
This seems very incorrect given that the UK has stricter laws around dismissal (the bar for losing your job is much higher), better minimum wage laws, more legally mandated holidays per year, paid time off for sickness, parental pay etc. - very basic things that the US doesn't have, at least not uniformly across states and industries.
However, the social benefits around leave etc are definitely better but this is perhaps because of a more homogeneous culture than the US where some states like to work their fingers to the bone, and some states are more relaxed. The UK is definitely work hard, play hard and the only national variation seems to be the work getting done (blue vs white collar in US terms)
That you can just wave a magic legal wand and go from zero to workers paradise in 25, 50, 100 years?
For what it's worth, Sweden and Denmark do not have minimum wages even today. So no, it's not a hugely useful proxy, otherwise according to you the US may have better worker's rights than Denmark (trivially false).
https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/what-to-do-if-youre-dismissed#:...
The rest is true, but a absolutely major one that is missing in the UK is unemployment benefits. If you lose your job you basically have no income at all.
Not only that, they are not available to visa holders, contrarily to most first world countries.
Lastly, the amount is still laughable. In Luxembourg I would have had 80% of my salary for a year, without conditions. The UK is not a first world country at all.
Because Luxembourg has a contribution-based welfare state. The money you are being paid is your own money that is being returned to you by the state when certain conditions are met (and yes, if you look at any contribution-based system, there is heavily conditionality, universal systems are the only ones without conditionality). The UK annual benefit bill just for people of working age is larger than Luxembourg's GDP.
The UK has a universal system that everyone can access regardless of circumstances. You just don't understand how it works at all (this is quite typical, Brits do not understand contribution-based systems either because they are used to a system where the state pays out massive amounts of cash to people in excess of the amount they paid in).
You also have only laughable unemployment benefits (£85 per week), that don't depend on your contributions.
You've already been corrected by someone else on the unemployment benefits so I'll not waste time repeating that.
The UK has a lot of problems, but downplaying workers rights in comparison to the states is a strange hill to die on.
1) https://www.tribunalclaim.com/unfair-dismissal/automatic-unf...
While I am fully on board with the sentiment that we are circling the drain, can you be more specific about where is actually better? I'm interested both from the perspective of potential emigration, but also trying to be rational rather than sensationalist - if I'm stuck here, I want a clearer picture of what "good" looks like.
My current sense is that a country like Switzerland is probably what most Brits would be happiest with (myself included), but that is not compatible with our national self-identity as a "major player" which is falling behind. Sometimes I think we'd be better off giving up the nukes and handing out UN security council seat to India, but that is not exactly an easy sell for a politician.
I didn't experience much of the social services in the US so I won't expand on them, but in Luxembourg and France you get world class healthcare for free or very cheap (even for foreigners) in a timely manner, you get years of unemployment benefits, public transportation is better and cheaper (free in LU), transportation overall is better and cheaper (UK trains are notoriously horrible), etc.
The Tories are, for obvious reasons, totally unable to reform it. Labour are willing to do so but are inhibited by the fact that the vast majority of funding comes from unions who oppose any reform.
Worker's rights aren't "worse" than the US. It also depends what you mean, worker's rights in Denmark are "worse" than the US too...that isn't necessarily a bad thing if the system works. One of the biggest issues in the UK is that businesses are nervous about hiring people at all because firing people opens you up to virtually unlimited liability...I don't think this is a good thing, 20% of the UK's adult population are economically inactive.
Private Eye on "24 Hours to Save the NHS" <https://twitter.com/KulganofCrydee/status/833654730849136641>
Both Blair and Cameron said that the BMA are, by far, the most powerful lobbying group in the UK (the savaging that Blair got from the BMA in 2000/01 when the spending increases were being planned caused him massive issues, and the resulting spending increases ended up creating quite a few problems because of this).
All of these things make people better off somehow.
Uh... Having more money?
Country A is richer than Country B if and only if Country A has more money. Country B may have a great QOL, low obesity, low inequality, etc etc. But its not richer unless it has more money. That's kinda what the word means.
With the deluge of content that is available it is simply their prerogative.
They have time to make said comments. It's not that they don't have the time, but perhaps that they want their opinion to heard and their implicit supposed authority to be recognised with the minimum amount of effort.
>With the deluge of content that is available it is simply their prerogative.
It's their prerogative regardless of the amount of content available. That's irrelevant.
He says in 10 years Britain (currently nice) = Poland (up and coming?) = Bangladesh (not as nice)
The quote that prompted the OP to discard the entire article (lol):
> A slowdown in “frontier growth” and technological progress matters a lot for the United States. But it matters less to Poland or Bangladesh – countries that are still trying to get to the frontier.
That Poland is a nice place is neither here nor there. Poland and Bangladesh are both playing catch up (objectively true). Britain used to not be playing catch up. Now it is starting to have to play catch up. That's bad.
2 decades of EU largesse and cross-Europe migrant remittances will do that. Does the UK have a similar windfall coming?
But don't other countries have more than two decades of reimttances yet are still stuck at 10x lower gdps than poland?
Could it simply be that good policy and hard work are the reasons why poland is developing?
People focus on GDP a lot, but wealth is just as important - because wealth creates opportunities and innovation. When Poland transformed from communism to capitalism most people had savings for less than a month. Nobody was rich. You can't do a startup or a company if you start starving after 1 month without income. And don't get me started about trying to get a credit when your only asset is house you share with 6 other people in the middle of post-communist nowhere.
This changed in last 20 years, but we still got long way to go.
People in the west are blind to how wealthy they are, and how many opportunities it creates. I worked for a small family company in UK that did embedded devices for blind people. 2 students after university created it because a father of one of them got blind. It's still hard to do in Poland. In 90s it was impossible for 99.9% of the population.
Anyway - I also disagree with your characterization of Polish economic boom. The EU contribution to Poland started at about 2.5% of GDP and is currently around 1% yearly. It's nice to have, but it's not the determining factor. Polish export to EU is over 33% of GDP for comparison. It grew over 20 times since 2004.
It's not the donations that keep countries in EU, it's the trade.
Ok, but that's modern britain. Millions of people can't save money and are far from rich. Plenty will starve after one month of no income. News reports seem to indicate quite a few already do even if they are employed.
> In 90s it was impossible for 99.9% of the population.
99% of the british or western population doesn't start a startup either. That's why people resent the 1%. The main reason people in east europe don't have the culture of starting startups is due to the communist model that supressed the natural human tendency of doing trade and innovation. It's simple as that. Now that that's gone, Poland and the rest of the former bloc, are acquiring a taste for it.
You are right about wealth accumulation though. That's why countries such as Italy or Greece for instance seem developed. Not having had a war in a long time, they were able to build their infrastructure and benefit from it. Let alone Britain that managed to accumulate wealth, by means we all know. Now that the same means can't be employed it would appear that a long, cold, period of decline lies ahead. Let's see how well these countries can handle the sea of change about to come. I bet they won't be as resilient and determined as, say Poland, which only as recently as 30 years became free and achieved so much. To put it into perspective you are probably older than your country was free.
West Europe lacks that determination. The US and East Europe (and a few others) have it. The future, I believe, belongs to them.
> If the UK continues with the same rate of growth it has enjoyed over the last decade, then Poland will be richer than Britain in about 12 years’ time.
I find unlikely. I mean, we're doing good economically wise, but not that good. We're going to catch up to Greece and Portugal soon enough - just like the Czech Republic did, but e.g. Italy is out of reach anywhere in the near future.
Because the author is firmly in the camp that fails to aknowledge any and all progress made by east european countries, and by Poland in particular. Wouldn't fit the narrative of a brexit campaign focused on slandering those nations and their citizens.
Furthermore, putting it next to Bangladesh, or India, the author thinks, may make the damage done to former colonies of west european "powers" less obvious. The reality of east europe, and poland in particular, being significantly more developed than the rest of the world - much of which has suffered at the hands of said "powers" - is irrelevant.
That particular line of text discredits the whole article, which in my view, doesn't belong here. It belongs at most on the dailymail, or perhaps the guardian - another library of content that tirelessly portrairs east europeans as some sort of underclass worthy of pitty and scarecrow.
But you know, in Poland, a country with an ever growing economy, eggs are not rationed. So perhaps the author is right in way that Poland may overtake the UK, sooner rather than later. Personally I have full confidence it will.
I don't think it will happen during my lifetime in nominal terms(so e.g. GDP per capita), but to me personally it doesn't matter, because my quality of life is already where I want it to be. Arguably it's even better at home, because here I can at least afford real estate.
Public services and government that used to work well now don’t, and opportunities that everyday folk used to have they now don’t.
It’s still a nice place if you’re in a good career, but the long term prospects don’t look good.
There's so much research on developing countries, but I find deteriorating countries more interesting. There are many countries that used to be first world, and simply are not anymore. Argentina is the classic example, South Africa is the most heated example.
[0] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-...
America won’t try to coup that part of the world. (As far as I know.)
The world in 2023 is different from the world in the 1970s which is different from the world in the 1940s.
2. The institutional changes that caused Venezuela's dramatic slide only really began to take hold in the 2000s, and were exacerbated by the global collapse in commodity prices in the 2012-15 period.
3. Plenty of petro-states across South and Central America have in 2023 reached a state of development comparable to eastern members of the EU (ie. In the 0.7 or high development range).
4. GDP per capita is a crummy metric to compare economic development. GDP (and ergo per capita GDP) are metrics to benchmark production, not social development, which are better measured when looking at metrics such as HDI, Life Expectancy, Literacy Rate, Median Income, Childhood Mortality Rate, etc.
Even though Venezuela had a very high GDP per capita in the late 1970s/early 1980s, it was extremely unevenly distributed. In fact, in the time period that Venezeula had the 4th highest GDP per capita, it's Gini Coefficient (the metric for wealth inequality) was 0.500 [0]. This is in line with Angola and Zimbabwe today, and was much worse than other nations across South America.
By that time period, the kind of interventions you saw in Chile, Guatemala, etc were not as vogue, with the Iran-Contra Scandal acting as the final nail in the coffin for any direct clandestine intervention.
Venezuela's problems today are caused by Venezuela's leaders mismanaging the economic dividend in the 2000s and elites on both sides of the aisle in Venezeula working to undermine institutions to their benefit.
[0] - https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-05147-2_...
Which was a policy suggested by an Iraqi (Farouk al-Kasim) to the Norwegian government. [0]
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-scale-of-gl...
[1] > The United States war in Afghanistan continues destroying lives due to the war-induced breakdown of the economy, public health, security, and infrastructure. Afghans have been massively improverished by the conflict. 92% of the population faces some level of food insecurity and 3 million children are at risk of acute malnutrition. Some regions are currently facing famine. At least half the population is living on less than $1.90 per day.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/af...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2021/08/26/afghanistan-america-fail...
The whole point, as I understand it, is to research what happens in the (still) rich and advanced nations which (slowly) lose their riches and advancements.
Results are similar if you ignore PPP. [2]
I’m not really sure where your numbers came from but I assume the ranking is a bit sensitive to the time boundaries (ie recovery from gfc and pandemic) so I don’t know how relevant it would be even if I had found the same results as you.
I found the uk looks a bit better for growth from 2010 to 2019, which ignores some pandemic recovery failures mentioned in the OP and Germany’s larger 2009-2010 growth.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/national-gdp-wb?tab=chart...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/national-gdp-constant-usd...
The peers are Germany, Spain, Italy, France. Ie other large countries.
If all that GDP growth is going into the hands of just a few players what's the point?
I know of a number of US companies that have started hiring UK employees because you can get principal engineers for £80k.
It's really hard in this country to find anyone who is willing to break that 6 digit ceiling, our regressive tax policies keep it that way.
In the US I know people with GEDs working Plumbing, HVAC, Electrical, Diesel Mechanics, etc. making $100k-150k in areas where a house in the nice neighborhood cost $200k. So the fact that you have people making so little in London where it costs a million to buy a house really shows how bad the UK has it.
Tradespeople can earn fortunes anywhere. I can recall Ireland during the 'Celtic Tiger' phase bricklayers were absolutely milking it. I actually regret I don't have a trade under my belt.
There are plumbers in the UK who don't work full-time and make £300k/year (Pimlico Plumbers, notoriously, pay massive salaries because they do a lot of on-call work in central London). It doesn't cost a million to buy a house in most of London, they just built the Elizabeth line which goes fairly deep outside central London so you can live outside and work inside quite easily.
This is not to say that there aren't issues with wages, with house prices but they are significantly more complex than people outside the UK think...who will often compare tech salaries outside London with those in SF, as if people working in tech in WV are earning the same as in SF (this is particularly strange because most of the companies in SF have offices in London where they pay the same amounts).
I heard that is turnover for the “employee”, not a salary, and you have to account for VAT, paying the company for admin/ marketing and other business expenses etc which are no small sums
No, it isn't. Again, this comes from knowing what these people are actually making rather than Googling furiously to prove someone wrong online. You can find endless articles about this though, emergency plumbers make a lot of money, Pimlico Plumbers have been paying these kind of salaries for decades.
I was trying to find sources, not prove you wrong. I was genuinely curious and very very skeptical at those are huge sums even for a plumber in central London.
Here’s a source of £89k for a plumber doing 60 hours a week and the MD £100k https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/751087/what-happened-when-piml...
Shrug…
I guess if there are endless articles citing £300k you can easily reply with a link?
Wealth can mean many things, but it is often associated with your savings more than your income. If you go by median wealth per adult, the UK is still wealthier than the US as a whole (#11 globally vs #21). The mean is another story, but that is no doubt influenced by the fact that there are many extremely wealthy people in the US.
From that, I conclude that Mississippi isn’t one of the poorest, but one of the least rich states of the US, not that the UK isn’t pretty rich.
Some engineering graduates get paid astonishingly low amounts of money but they are also typically the kind of dime-a-dozen grads with no particularly interesting skills.
“I know people” on such a upper-middle class board is bound to give a skewed picture if you compare your anecdotes with the median of whatever the other side is.
They mostly don't; if you annualize the UK median weekly earnings with a degree from 2016-2017, you get GBP 30,524. (Unfortunately, this isn’t a regularly-published breakdown.)
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
> In the US I know people with GEDs working Plumbing, HVAC, Electrical, Diesel Mechanics, etc. making $100k-150k in areas where a house in the nice neighborhood cost $200k.
The people you know aren’t a representative sample.
For college educated people, the median wage in the US (in 2022) is around $71,000/£54,000 [2] compared to (in 2019) £34,000 in the UK [3]
Note that almost all Americans get health insurance from either their employer or via Medicaid with around 8% of Americans lacking any sort of insurance [4], but even then in most cases they would most likely be covered by subsidized prices [5], so it would be a wash comparing with the NHS or using that as a justification when even Australia, Canada, and NZ have much higher salaries compared to the UK despite having a similar healthcare system.
Big picture, it appears that if you are skilled or semi-skilled, you can earn significantly more in the US than the UK.
[0] - https://www.bls.gov/oes/2022/may/construction2.htm
[1] - https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
[2] - https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2023/data-on-display/educa...
[3] - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/graduates-continue-to-ben...
[4] - https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-facts-about-th...
[5] - https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/study-finds-hospitals-cash...
Hell, the legal minimum wage annualizes to £20k
Also you can't compare industry the way you are. There are LOTS of individual plumbers,electricians,... in the UK making £100k-£200k+ ... I know a few of them. It is a running joke how much the trades get paid. I know a window cleaner that makes £500k running a window cleaning business.
That's the same everywhere.
I'm also sure there are people in New York, NY struggling to afford a tiny one bed apartment ... just like London.
I'm not defending the UK, I am attacking your poor reasoning.
> Americans could stop working each year on September 20th and they’d still be richer than Britons working for the whole year.
...and yet the average American almost never stops working. That car wash manager in Alabama gets three weeks of PTO per year, and probably earns every cent of their $125k -- Buc-ee's is a pretty demanding employer, I think?
Of course I would like to see the UK import the average GDP of the US, but I'm not sure I want the social structures that go along with it. I would rather be importing those from our former friends in the EU, with whom we actually have a lot more in common with culturally than we like to admit.
> Or reading about the 70s, with stories of 20-somethings leavings their jobs to go hitchhike through California.
> In France — with a 20%+ youth unemployment rate and incessant, neurotic talk about it — one does not quit their jobs to “figure things out”
https://twitter.com/Altimor/status/1668138067088080896
Not just elites - ordinary british people too. I've been saying for 10 years that britain is falling behing the rest fo Europe.
I give real examples from my life, "In Czech republic I/anyone has access to Proton therapy and housing is better built, but in Britain protin therapy is missing (was first built last year, ex-communist CZ has it for like 20 years) and quality housing is only accessible to millionairs."
And if I am taling to a british person, there is like a 50% chance they will get offended and respond like "well then why are you here". I had similar responce on this very forum.
And when "locals" bring this up publically, they get accused of 'talking britain down'. Kind of came up in the brexit debate under 'project fear'.
I feel it will get a lot worse before people will finally get their sputnic moment and realise they are in a hole.
So it is true, places like the Czech Republic have done well versus the UK...they have good policies in place, they are doing sensible things. For some reason though, the comparison is never made with places like Spain or Italy, most East European countries are now ahead of them and Britain is still ahead of them too. Even more strangely, no-one is suggesting that we should be more like these countries either...that we should be friendly to business, that we should limit immigration...strange, isn't it?
People outside the UK talk a lot about Brexit, the reason why it isn't really mentioned outside Westminster in the UK is because it isn't that important. We don't export much to the EU (we consume far more), it isn't a huge consumer market, it is shrinking, and there has been no real noticeable impact...even in industries that were going to be "decimated" (such as meat processing)...it isn't happened. There has just been no real impact to speak of. The only exception was NI, which was a situation designed by the EU in order to place pressure on voters ahead of the 2019 election...which didn't work, and which has largely been unwound now that the EU has seen sense (and after several terrorist attacks in NI largely due to, well justified, fears that the EU was motivated by Ireland's desire to seize their country). After 2019, all the rhetoric basically disappeared because all the people pushing for a second referendum discovered they didn't have a job anymore (and everyone else who kept their job, said they never really supported a second referendum at all).
I've run a startup in UK and my family has a company in CZ, Britain is so much more friendly to business from my experience.
> there has been no real noticeable impact...even in industries that were going to be "decimated" [by brexit]
What is the basis for your opinion?
I have been unable to get goods from EU because of customs. I cannot post thing back to my family because now you get charged VAT for sending gifts by post to EU. I have never met a person that deals with import or export who was not dismayed by this.
...what? Stop for a second and think about what you are saying. Do you believe that one of the largest export markets for the EU was suddenly shut down overnight?
The rules with VAT are unrelated to Brexit, and were largely due to the staggering levels of VAT fraud occurring with imports from China. If you are sending things to relatives, you do not pay VAT...that isn't what it is for.
Baffling. I don't even know what to say at this point. You don't understand how any of this stuff works, why rules were change, these points should be obviously wrong to you with even the slightest application of logic.
Okay, you claim your weird points...look at the results of any public company that trades with Europe. You have companies that run cross-border meat processing, something that was supposed to be impossible after Brexit...none reported any impact (because they prepared their documents, and this was something that most of these companies were already doing because...surprise, surprise...the EU does not encompass the whole world, and they traded in and outside of the EU already).
> something that was supposed to be impossible after Brexit
Checks on food products coming into the UK from the EU haven't even started yet, but will soon. So yeah, pretty bad for you to not know that.
I am working for a large mutinational right now
> It is almost impossible to build anything anywhere
ye the british planning system for real estate is insane.
But if you want to build motorcycles, certify them as roadworthy and sell them, it's really easy.
> you have the government telling private banks to bail out mortgage-holders...
Let me ask you a question, if those. mortgage holder go under en masse, and yhe housing market starts collapsing, will the banks be calling the government?
> The rules with VAT are unrelated to Brexit,
You are charged VAT on all imports. When we qyit customs union, podt from my family became imports. This has nothing to do with China.
> You don't understand how any of this stuff works
eh..
(For example, through it I discovered that Ireland's nearest twin in both land and population is South Carolina.)
Looking at the UK specifically, it's the GDP of California but with almost 2x the population, which comes out to a GDP per capita comparable to Mississippi.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...
UK median household income £29.4K https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom
There are no US states as poor as the UK, Alabama included.
Considering that computing makes increasing use of neural networks, and that the new phase in capitalism will arguably be based almost entirely on this type of infrastructure, it seems to me, in fact, that the statement is contradictory in itself, paradoxical.
Many will blame Brexit, but the writing has been on the wall for decades. Most of my friends in Britain have been either biding their time for retirement, trying to go literally anywhere else, or in a deep sort of quiet depression, usually aided by alcohol. These are well to do, white collar workers.
It will be interesting to watch the country decline. Will we see the rise of extremists in Parliament? Will Parliament even matter? Will Britain become a proxy for reverse colonialism in the way that Italy has? Can the financial might of London persist, or will there be an exodus?
The UK is nothing like a “failed state” (the monopoly on legitimate violence is not seriously in doubt.) It may be experiencing decline in relative economic condition, but that’s hardly novel.
The author goes on to never support this thesis, and instead complains about British politics and that UK growth isn't quite as fast as the US.
The UK has a higher GDP per capita than France. They are in no way a "developing" country.
Does the UK need more tractors? Is there high unemployment (labor underutilized)? It does not seem so. What are the inputs and technology that the UK needs to improve?
But don't try to claim that the UK's economy is structured more like Bangladesh than the US. Or, if you do, at least directly support that claim with some facts.
How are you including war crimes in this calculus? I'd rather be mugged than have a fascist rocket kill my entire family.
Wonderful city otherwise though, coffee and chocolate shops across historical center especially.
The UK has a lot of these. The railways are notoriously expensive and inadequate because they're over a century old, and we're designed for a different society with different traffic patterns. The housing stock wasn't affected that much but The War, and many of the larger older houses were built with the assumption that they're would be servants living there too. Heavy industry was reliant on a lot of manual labour, and didn't mechanise when the opportunity arose.
The biggest problem is that democracy arose in the age of the humanities, when the sciences were idle curiosities for eccentrics. The revolutions in England - which negatively affected the rest of the archipelago - happened in the seventeenth century, too early for an urban middle class to have its say. The political establishment still has too many landowners - too much power is feels by the descendents of warlords. Most of the power is held by former members of Oxbridge debating societies, who've never had to do anything than throw ideas about. The Civil Service is run by a core of 'generalists' with humanities degrees, with subordinate groups of 'specialists' who can never rise to the top.
The same problem afflicts business: the country is run by people who are barely competent in arithmetic. US politicians are accused of insider trading and gerrymandering; British politicians don't have the skills needed to commit these crimes. Boris Johnson needed epidemiologists to explain percentages to him; the water companies have debts that are almost equal to the dividends they've paid out since privatisation.
The solution is not political, but rather economic. Many of these businesses can be undercut by the use of industry knowledge. Software startups are cheap to run if the founders have a deep understanding of the problem, can build much of the solution themselves, and know who their customers are. In manufacturing, the Midlands and the North have long histories and community cultures surrounding these industries, and are desperate for someone to bring the factories back.
Once technical people have money, the politicians can be bought. They're surprisingly cheap.
In a mathematical sense, the problem is solved. We just need to stop waiting for the lawyers and classical philologists to do technical work, and do it ourselves. We're not getting value out of our elites, so we should get better ones.
The sheer lack of respect that Brits have for techncial and scientific education is insane. It seems everyone in the UK is trying to target some sort of Finance or Consulting adjacent role or some sort of Government role.
Almost every decisionmaker that I interacted with there appears to be some kind of an Econ, Classics, or Law grad, while similar roles in the US or Canada would have someone with a STEM degree or military service experience.